The present invention relates to the automatic generation of a musical piece in a selected genre and having a desired duration.
In a typical audiovisual environment, it is often desirable to shorten or lengthen the performance duration of, for example, a portion of a sound track associated with a video clip of a home or cinematic movie or a television commercial. Video sequences are often repetitively edited before an aesthetically satisfactory sequence is achieved. An audio source segment associated with the video sequence must similarly be edited to form an audio output sequence that is synchronized to match the duration of the edited video output sequence.
Exemplary video editing products, such as Pinnacle Studio (Pinnacle Systems, Inc., Mountain View, Calif.), are not typically equipped with the powerful audio editing capabilities of music production applications such as, for example, the Cubase System SX (Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH) application and its progeny. Such music production applications allow segmentation of a musical piece into discrete audio blocks, which can be manually configured in a desired order by an author of an audio sequence.
Applications for shortening or lengthening the performance duration of a music piece include systems that rely on audio block looping, on uniformly regulating the reproduction speed of the piece, and/or on rearranging the audio blocks in orders that do not necessarily preserve the musical integrity, or theme, of the edited music piece.